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Christopher Scotton

Goodreads Author

Born

in Washington, D.C., The United States

Website

http://www.christopherscotton.com

Genre

Fiction

Member Since

January 2013

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I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth.

When I was about Kevin’s age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site—creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of l I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth.

When I was about Kevin’s age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site—creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of loss at the destruction of our woods—one we couldn’t quite understand or articulate, but it hung over us that summer like a fogged-in field.

By the time I went off to college, the countryside of my youth was solidly suburban. It was in college that I first fell in love with Appalachia. Initially for her music—the spinning lilt of a fiddle reel; the compact fury of a mandolin run; the plaintive harmonies—then, for her beauty, as I came to know the region in my twenties with little but a backpack and a camp stove.

About that time, I met a good friend’s mother for the first time—she was an incredibly beautiful woman who seemed to carry with her a deep-set sadness. I asked my friend about it and he told me the story of how his three-year-old brother died in the most horrific accident at home you could possible imagine. I carried the story of this child’s death with me for many years and knew that I had to write a novel about its effect on a family. I also knew that Appalachia, a region I’d come to loved so well, would be a perfect setting for this nascent coming-of-age novel.

But as the years unspooled—I graduated from college, began a career, moved to London, got married, had kids—I discovered innumerable reasons not to write. In fact, I perfected the art of excuse-making. On and on, month after month, year-to-year.

And as I stared down forty, I realized that this great bright dream of being a novelist was in danger of becoming my single biggest regret. I began writing The Secret Wisdom of the Earth the very next day, with the awful death of my friend’s young brother as the tragedy that sets the story in motion.

It was slow-going, to be sure—I’d rise at 5:00 a.m. each morning, write in the quiet hours before work, then revise and edit in the evenings after putting my boys to bed. But it was in this routine of early rising and evening editing that the main characters, Kevin, Buzzy, Pops, Tilroy and Paul, began to take shape.

I completed about half of the novel in London—fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers—but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything together turned out to be nub ends. I moved back to the States and immediately went down to eastern Kentucky in hopes of breaking this narrative logjam. It was on this trip that I saw my first Mountaintop Removal operation.

The horrific gray scar of that mine brought back the sense of sickening loss I’d had at fourteen when the pristine woods I’d grown up in were cut down, hauled away and replaced with tract housing. I knew then, looking out over this massive, denuded landscape in Kentucky, that the eradication of these proud ancient mountains was a fitting allegory for a loss that all of the main characters suffer. Once I connected these themes, the rest of the story began to bubble forth.

My trips to Kentucky, talking with folks and listening to their stories, showed me that the apologue of Mountaintop Removal is a complicated one—one that can’t be reduced to simply good vs. evil or rich vs. poor. I tried to portray this hard-bought paradox and lay it alongside Kevin’s story in a compelling way. ...more

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Average rating: 4.1 · 9,563 ratings · 1,614 reviews · 3 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Secret Wisdom of the Earth 4.10 avg rating — 9,517 ratings — published 2015 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Secret Wisdom of the Earth - Free Preview (The First 4 Chapters) 4.20 avg rating — 46 ratings — published 2014	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton (January 05,2016) by Christopher Scotton (Goodreads Author), unknown author 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Christopher is Currently Reading

Christopher Scotton is currently reading

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

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May 08, 2013 03:04PM

Christopher Scotton is currently reading

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra (Goodreads Author)

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May 23, 2013 03:57AM

Quotes by Christopher Scotton (?)

“I guess I learned that even though most people are good, they can be talked into doing bad things by one or two jerks...And I guess, people sometimes need someone who can stand up and remind them that they are good people and they know what's right.”
― Christopher Scotton, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

12 likes

“Pops smiled. “Son, the more people I meet, the less good I get at labeling them. That’s a wisdom I hope you acquire.”
― Christopher Scotton, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

8 likes

“I held her and she cried into my shoulder so deeply that I could feel the sorrow from her soul blending completely and profoundly with my own.”
― Christopher Scotton, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

8 likes

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Polls

What book would you like to read for our December 2023 Group Read? The theme is Wisdom.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
Science Nonfiction

16 votes 22.5%

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
Historical Fiction

12 votes 16.9%

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Nonfiction

11 votes 15.5%

The Cloisters by Katy Hays
Fiction, Mystery

11 votes 15.5%

Wise Children by Angela Carter
Fiction, Magical Realism

7 votes 9.9%

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Contemporary, Spirituality

7 votes 9.9%

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Biography

4 votes 5.6%

The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
Contemporary

3 votes 4.2%

71 total votes

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Christopher’s Quotes

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

3517 likes

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

tags: bookroom, books, libraries, wisdom

10421 likes